131–140 of 171 posts
Burnout is just when you run out of burn. It's like getting sleepy. You run out of the thing keeping you from being sleepy. You gotta get more stuff to burn if you wanna burn it.
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> Burnout is just the moment whe you stop fruitlessly caring. To me it was the moment I started breaking down in tears when getting to the subway station down my street, on my way to work. Every day. The next time was when I could not speak about my job and the project I was working on without stammering and my mind going blank (and still couldn’t for months after quitting). “Frustrated" and "stop to fruitlessly care…
I think by the time you burst out in tears when traveling to work you’ve probably passed the point of burnout. Not sure what else to call it, but the stage described above probably comes first.
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The good old fashioned Job Resources / Job Demands 2x2 strikes again. - Low resources * low demands = low motivation + average stress. You don't really give a shit about the job, but it's also not taking a lot out of you either. - High resources * low demands = high motivation + low stress. The dream! - High resources * high demands = high motivation + average stress. You've got a lot on your plate - but you also fee…
Low resource, low demand = working the grill at a sleepy diner High resource, low demands = working in a test kitchen High resource, high demand = working Michelin star restaurant Low resource, high demand = working at fast food
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In short, depression, to me, was total and absolute hopelessness. Burn out, on the other hand, brought me dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of being trapped in a pointless but never-ending cycle. If I were to dive into more details, depression gave me a rock-solid certainty that I could never be happy, or meaningfully enjoy life in any meaningful way. There might have been some joyous and light-hearted mome…
How did you get yourself out of these? I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. I used to be more energetic and fairly optimistic. I’m not even stressed and have overcome a few minor health issues that used to bother me. Yet at this point, I can’t help but feel the best years have passed and now it just a slow decline to the end. (But no t…
Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things.
This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be.
Once you commit to spending some time every day/week simply to enjoy yourself and have fun, now you can choose an activity.
At first it may seem difficult because everything may seem pointless or discouraging. Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. They may be easy and tempting, but really must be avoided. The best choices are social, such as team sports, board games, ballroom dancing, etc. Outdoor activities are also great: walking in nature, riding a bike, etc. Artsy stuff like painting or embroidery are okay, but being neither social nor outdoorsy means they won't be as beneficial.
If you are particularly industrious you may be tempted to learn a new skill like a new language, or going to the gym. Beware: your actual goal is to lighten up your mood and enjoy yourself, not to "be productive" or "be the best version of yourself". Your obsession with productivity is probably what got you in this mess in the first place.
Simply allow yourself to be a kid again. Do fun stuff that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
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Very well-articulated. I finally felt like I was bouncing back when I just accepted not giving a fuck and doing the absolute minimum to fulfill whatever the goals seem to be of whoever's deciding on them. Do they care about rendering performance? No? Well then I'm sure as hell not goimg to lose sleep over it, and if it seems actively harmful to customers *that I've met* then it's just a place to leave. There's always…
Yeah, i totally agree. The more years I have behind my belt as developer the less I care. I do what I'm paid for. I do it to best of my abilities, but I don't care much. I care for my wife, my unborn child, my dog, myself. Seriously live is so much more than work and code. I learned to balance myself. I need job for $ and that's it. If I won lottery I would still code, just not as much (2 h/day) and only fun stuff. W…
Consequently, it's becoming painfully aware to me that if I were to lose my amazingly well-paid job in which I (feel like I truly) excel, it'd be a pain to look for a new one. Because of my niche, I would, most likely, have to go down with my pay by one or even two seniority levels to be a standard SWE in a different company right now.
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I agree with everything you wrote. However you misunderstood where I was coming from. I point out I was lucky enough to be able to take time off to focus on my health, and hint that that is sadly not something everyone can do. I was able to do this not because of being employed in a high paying tech job, but because of strong union negotiated benefits. I live in a European country with a sane perspective on work life…
Where are these messages of people dealing with burn out in a month. I haven’t seen them. Took me a year and more while working. You don’t need to be taking a break, just change of project/environment can be enough from experience. Like all these articles say, burn out comes from a number of sources, removing these will end up fixing things over a period of time.
Check this thread, you'll find at least one.
I suffered burn out about 15 years ago. If you would have asked me back then, if I was feeling stress or was nearing burn out, I would have said no, not a chance. I was feeling great. If you however would have me take one of those self assessment tests, it would show all the red flags. I guess what I am trying to say is this: don’t necessarily trust your own assessment of the situation. Keep your eyes out for the war…
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As you move up the business ladder, or indeed start your own business, it's interesting to see how priorities evolve. When you're a coder, the code matters. It can be frustrating to see resources allocated to say marketing. When you are responsible for acquiring resources, then there's more to care about, more to balance. When to market. When to get new hardware. Programmers care about code performance, code elegance…
Not really. The specifics about how a product is differentiated might seem like irrelevant minutia (fps or rendering times, for example) to an outsider while still being critical for market success. Installing people into senior positions does not make them better at recognizing these factors, or more incentivized to care. The point is that a senior can use your argument to trivialize the efforts of an engineer, seem…
If I'm over here spending my late nights trying to pare down our webpack bundle, but my actual day is already done because it was decided that it should be spent doing something else, then someone is liable to get frustrated with how little influence they have over the outcome or reward system. If a customer then comes back and says "oh I love how snappy it is" you can certainly pat yourself on the back for it, but you have no real control over whether that translates into compensation for your effort, either in terms of accolades or money or product direction, unless you're the one making those decisions already.
Part of the reason, in that specific case, is that not only is it hard to say as an IC what the results would be otherwise had you not done X, but also what future results might be if you were to do X again.
It's not that those choices are irrelevant or that they don't have an impact, but if you don't get to allocate company resources to it, and are hoping for a better outcome but can't control that outcome or perception of your work, then it's not worth it.
If I'm John Carmack, I'm going to care deeply about rendering performance of my game, because if it's great, I might make millions, and I get to decide that that's what my employees are optimizing for. If I'm one of those employees, I'm going to meet his expectations, and if I'm very lucky, he'll think highly of me later on. That's... it. Unless I have decent shares or something.
Likewise if you're repeatedly trying to position yourself as the tryhard, you run the risk of reducing your capacity for doing literally anything else in life, which should be a real concern, because if you're not allocating resources at the company to your time, then you're devaluing your own time and resources for no reason; burnout.
Now out yourself in the same position at a massive company that has hierarchies of managers who's sole job it is to check that the status of tickets have changed or whatever. The chance your extracurricular work will influence a better outcome for you is basically nil, because the value of anyone's job is not defined by anything related to quality.
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> because having medical insurance tied to work is obviously suboptimal. That is a solved problem in many countries. When the US grows up from its individual first, frontier moxie, pissing context it could have it too.
> When the US grows up from its individual first, frontier moxie, pissing context it could have it too. IMHO, this is not what is wrong with the system in the US. The problem is that the consumer of healthcare is doubly removed from the price. First by the insurance company using the doctors. Second by one's workplace paying for the insurance. Is it any wonder that prices keep going up under such a scheme?
- ban employer-provided insurance entirely. - provide tax breaks for employers who provide insurance stipends to their employees - provide tax breaks for people to buy insurance on the marketplaces - make open enrollment a once a quarter or once a month thing, or even allow you to switch insurance anytime.
The entire problem is that there’s no free market. The people using it aren’t able to negotiate. And when there’s a problem you have to pay your insurance until open enrollment. This means you have no way to vote with your wallet.
Throwaway account. I work at an early stage startup which I joined on the day one about two years ago. I don’t want to get into too much details but couple months ago we did a pivot, threw away most of the old product and now pretending the new offering is complete (it is the opposite). I was onboard with the new vision for the company but couple months ago I started noticing something isn’t right. I felt anxious, ti…